Was GamePass the downfall of Xbox?

Not specifically gamepass no. It was a combination of things IMO.

1. Gamepass.
2. Xbox sales falling off a cliff.
3. Purchasing so many devs\publishers and then gaming in general falling off a cliff compared to where it was during Covid.
3. mediocre game releases.
 
I think lack of major exclusives was what was Xbox actual downfall - without good exclusives a console just wont sell.. doing away with exclusives will be the final nail in the coffin of the Xbox hardware imo

It sure did not help that Gamepass made players not buy games on Xbox either - means even less games on the platform
 
Yes and No. Just to clarify this a bit, Kinect was initially an add-on, people willfully went out and purchased it because of hit games like Dance Central and Kinect Sports. Dance Central 1&2 were pretty great games actually. It was a fad where motion was all the rage at the time and some neat stuff came out of it, along with shovelware, mostly shovelware. The platform didn't have to hurt any more than the Guitar Hero and Rockband fad going away because they're mutually exclusive platforms.

Everything was fine, until....

They forced it into Xbox One and you had no choice but to buy the damn thing if you wanted to buy an Xbox, adding $100 to the bill, and to exacerbate the issue further, there were some decisions that went into the design of Xbox One that made it cost more to make than a PS4 while at the same time being less powerful. They needed to guarantee that the system had 8GB of ram to run the ambitious OS, there was no route to 8GB of GDDR5 at the time (If you look up the timeline, Samsung had not released a chip with the density to fit it on the board in a 256-bit design) so you either had to stick with 4GB of GDDR5 or 8GB of DDR3 and MS went with the latter while Sony stuck with 4GB of GDDR5... whelp the stars were aligned for Sony and production was right on time that allowed the use of 8GB where Sony upped the system from 4GB to 8GB of GDDR5 which made fans go on a frenzee. The Xbox One having gone with 8GB of DDR3 meant they had to add ESRAM to the die, which made the GPU die actually more expensive and the design more complicated for developers, but also left little room for compute units, ultimately leaving a die with 14CUs vs Sony 20CUs (respectively 12 and 18 active).

All of the above is to say that you have one system that's $100 more expensive and less powerful, it just did not make sense to gamers, but it didn't end there, now here comes what imo made things a horrible start for Xbox, the "Always On, always online" policy where games had to do a check against the server or you would get a message that you needed to connect to the internet for the game disc that you purchased would work... W... T... F!? people started going bananas, there were even YouTube videos showing games suddenly stop working because of this check, it happened with Killer Insticnt during a tournament, and although it was ultimately reversed with a day one patch, severe damage was already done, the news spread like wildfire and gamers refused to touch an Xbox even with a 10 foot pole, the momentum that Xbox 360 had built over the PS3 was completely wiped clean and it is now Xbox One doing the walk of shame like the PS3 $599 fiasco of 2005, a complete reversal where MS is still picking up the pieces.
I'm thinking thatn Xbox One and Wii U have some things in common: The continuation of a gimmick. The console maker itself doesn't even know how to utilize it to make games better.

Nintendo were unable to salvage the Wii U but they learned from its mistakes and made a great comeback with the Switch. Why were Xbox not able to make a comeback after the Xbox One fiasco? Phil Spencer said they lost the worst generation to lose, and PS4 was indeed a formidable competitor, but Wii U was a even worse case with 13,5 million units sold. And still Nintendo came back. Xbox didn't. And now it's too late.
 
RROD was the downfall, I know a lot of people that skipped the Xbox One purely because they were concerned with the consoles reliability, and I think it made Microsoft more conservative with it's APU design to prevent another fiasco which resulted in it being weaker than the PS4. The TV and Kinect reasons are overrated, people can just ignore that.
 
I think lack of major exclusives was what was Xbox actual downfall - without good exclusives a console just wont sell.. doing away with exclusives will be the final nail in the coffin of the Xbox hardware imo

It sure did not help that Gamepass made players not buy games on Xbox either - means even less games on the platform
Its not just the lack of exclusives but meaningful releases. Things like Halo and Gears should've been the focal point of quality and a standout for releases. But instead they squandered that with some middling releases, or non releases from 343i and Coalition. Then you have boneheaded decisions like to make Lionhead studios defunct, amongst all the other terrible decisions MS has done though the years. Like the Xbox One launch etc.

The transition to a service certainly didn't help though. They just had too many fingers in too every pies and ended up with slop, at least for this generation.
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom